A boy is crying, leaning against a bare tree. He is not allowed to go on a school trip to Pyongyang because teachers are embarrassed to take such a scraggy, undernourished boy to the showcase capital. Then something drops from heaven. It is a Christmas present.

The movie “Ryanggangdo Children” starts with a vibrant scene where lively South Korean children put presents in a sack that is tied to a big balloon to be sent to their peers in the impoverished North. Days later, the boy accidentally finds a Christmas card and a white plastic toy robot in a red sack hung on a tree. The story now evolves around the toy robot that all the children in the village clamor to get a hand on.

Director Jung Sung-san, a North Korea defector whose 2006 musical “Yoduk Story” made a big splash in South Korea and the U.S., wanted to send a message of hope through the lives of North Korean children.

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“It is not about ideology. Children are all same, no matter where they live,” Mr. Jung said in an interview. “The fact that they are born there is just heart-wrenching.”

He started filming this movie in 2004, but was only recently able to finish it. From the start, he said, it’s been challenging to raise money for a movie directed by a North Korean.

He was born to a father who was in charge of an agency in Pyongyang that imported Mercedes-Benz vehicles. In 1994, the final year in his Pyongyang Drama and Movie College, he got caught while secretly listening to South Korean radio broadcast. He was immediately hauled off to a prison.

One day, as he was being taken back to the prison after a court trial, the car he was riding in got into an accident. He narrowly escaped and managed to arrive in South Korea in 1995. In 2004, he heard terrible news from a Chinese intermediary whom he paid to learn the fate of his family: his father had been stoned to death in 2002 because of the ‘traitor’ son.

“I’ve changed since then,” he said. “I was no more embarrassed about my origin.”

He set his mind on taking “revenge” on the North that brutally murdered his father. He produced “Yoduk Story” to portray the human rights abuses that happen in North Korea’s notoriously terrible gulags.

Jung Sung-san, the director of Ryanggangdo Children

When the musical went on show in 2006, it immediately attracted attention for its tragic love story between a female inmate and a prison guard as well as its graphic description of torture, inhumane acts inside prison camps that dot around the North.

Last year, he started a four-member rap group called Mok-nah-no-sah, which means ‘people who risk their lives to sing’ in Korean. The idea of making rap songs that verbally attack the two Kims in the North came after his friend lost a son in North Korea’s torpedoing the Cheonan warship in March 2010. He wanted to help his friend resolve his deep sorrow. The team has produced eight ‘diss songs’ so far.

“I am absolutely thrilled whenever I take back at North Korea with the help of my ‘cultural assets,” he said with a smile.

While working on the English version of “Yoduk Story,” he decided to also turn the musical into a movie. “When it happens, the two Koreas will have been unified, don’t you think?” he said with a laugh.

“Ryanggangdo Children” will hit theaters in South Korea later this month.